Fix Bad Government with More Government?

Real Clear Politics Dennis Byrne March 10, 2007

The partisans who are scoring political points by gnashing their teeth over the outpatient failures at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are missing the point: The government did it.

It is especially aggravating because many of these same partisans want to turn the nation’s health care system over to…the government.

Or have they somehow missed the fact that the care of veterans is the responsibility of the government? Do they somehow believe that a single-payer health care system, or universal health care, or whatever else they want to call it will be immune to the kind of bureaucratic insensitivity, apathy and bungling that is integral to government?

Would the stampeding fault-finders please explain to the world how they would ensure that civilian outpatients, under a bureaucracy rivaling the military’s, would not be ignored in the same manner that the military bureaucracy abandoned the wounded veterans in Building 18? With hundreds of millions of civilian patients, instead of thousands of wounded veterans, would someone give us a clue how the government would keep track of them all? With outpatient veterans getting lost under mountains of paperwork and red tape, how would government be more responsive to the needs of hundreds of millions?

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College students think they’re so special

MSNBC February 27, 2007

Study finds alarming rise in narcissism, self-centeredness in ‘Generation Me’

NEW YORK – Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

“We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special’ and having children repeat that back,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. “Kids are self-centered enough already.”

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

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Rethinking Abu Ghraib

Townhall.com Dinesh D’Souza February 26, 2007

HBO’s documentary “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” aired a few days ago, is yet another attempt to use the scandal to portray the Bush administration as soft on torture. Conservatives, meanwhile, continue to minimize the significance of what happened there. Some characterize Abu Ghraib as no big deal, what James Schlesinger termed “Animal House on the night shift.” Others defende Abu Ghraib as a way to get valuable information about potential terrorist attacks. Rush Limbaugh claimed that “maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart” because, as an interrogation technique, “it sounds pretty effective to me.”

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Global Hot Air: Part III

Townhall.com Thomas Sowell February 15, 2007

If you take the mainstream media seriously, you might think that every important scientist believes that “global warming” poses a great threat, and that we need to make drastic changes in the way we live, in order to avoid catastrophes to the environment, to various species, and to ourselves.

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An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change

The Times February 11, 2007

Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

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